ffmpreg [none/use name]

wholesomeness of the wifepill protects him from elons gaze

chat is this true? someone get the apology form

this unpredictability further exacerbates instability in the world.

天下大乱, 形势大好

looks like how i would imagine a high supersonic wake to look like but you usually can’t see wakes… maybe it is condensation

also the compression at the end is interesting, assuming its just getting pushed together by ambient pressure but ive never read anything about super far field effects like that (probably a solved problem/not interesting)

It first of all implies a level of rational thinking and conscious decision making that just doesn’t exist in reality.

i’m not here to argue theory of mind but imo it’s pretty arrogant to make the assumption that only ‘organisms’ that exist around human level complexity are capable of ‘rational thinking and conscious decision making’ when we aren’t even able to quantitatively assess the mechanisms behind the concepts in the first place.

security is defined as the structural ability to guarantee returns. it appears as things like shipping lanes, consistent legal frameworks, property rights, and the ability to enforce thereof. this applies to the imperial core and the areas where it performs extraction. you can see empire destabilizing regimes that threaten extractive capacity through nationalization or labor laws, but you don’t see empire destabilizing their own cobalt mines by giving workers fpv drones and off days. capital that does not prioritize a significant degree of baseline stability will get optimized out, which leads into your second point:

you can’t build an empire through meme stocks; in fact, financialization heralds the end of empire, which is why you see so much of it today. the abandonment of productive investment (as in, investment that produces things as opposed to investment that produces a return) is necessarily precipitated by systemic conditions that make other forms of accumulation easier. moving into rentierism, speculation and asset inflation does not contradict my earlier claims regarding stability (no one said anything about an endless pursuit of stability), as under the initial conditions established by the MC phase of accumulation, things are stable enough. this is what i meant by going up the hierarchy of needs, i think david harvey calls it capital switch. because financial short termism plays out as economic cannibalism where the logical end state is an imperial core that has been hollowed out by all the value being reallocated upward, capital is eventually forced out by socioeconomic collapse towards a more stable and conducive environment.

i’m not sure if you were intentionally misinterpreting security, but if i were to make a similar logical leap along your lines of reasoning then capital should by all means be flooding into real estate on the donbas border right now. a dualist us/china relationship has precedent in the genoese iberian condominium that was eventually superseded by the dutch internalization of both production (of which security is a prerequisite) and finance. the dutch were able to do this because returns, security and political control were all vertically integrated into a more coherent imperial core. moreover, the condominium was a historical aberration: spain lacked the administrative capacity while the genoese financiers were structurally restricted from political autonomy. neither is true in the us/china situation, which is why dualism will inevitably give way to competition. the ambitions of the american gerontocracy have little to do with it, the logic of capital is the primary driver of the transition.

all you’re really doing is creating a new hegemon that is totally focussed on a big domestic population consuming all the spoils of the world but with a hammer and sickle on the flag instead of stars and stripes

this is the correct analysis. the triffin dilemma still applies under the XHS strategy and shortly down the line we will have a 1.4 billion strong great satan equivalent. there are accelerationist arguments to be made that this is actually the fastest route towards communism, or at least world revolution, but that’s neither here nor there.

do you say that maybe we should instead work within the dollar system for now (while poking at it here and there) and hope that raising the development of the whole planet will create the material conditions for the dollar system to be undermined?

the historically prevalent ‘strategy’ (it should be thought of more as a natural phenomenon) within western capitalist development has been to bait (usually you just have to wait) the hegemon into a conflict while courting its capital with higher returns on investment.

capital also has a sort of hierarchy of needs, of which security is among the more basic. this is why a us/chinese dual hegemon system where china acts as the productive host for the american financial parasite is an unstable dynamic equilibrium at best: capital will inevitably choose stability and security over higher returns in the long run. this was demonstrated most notably by the elimination of the iberian (dual genoese/spanish+portuguese) system by the dutch (all three of the atlantic powers actually), who were able to better economize on security of production (starting from bog standard piracy, the most primitive of accumulations) within its system of political economy. later transitions did not deviate from this trend, but rather climbed up the hierarchy of needs with respect to where capital would place the imperial core.

this is where the higher returns come in, and can be seen in the dutch/british transition as well as the british/american transition. the fact of the matter is that the mechanics operant within financial hegemony are only able to parasitize the third world due to third world countries’ atomization and relatively tiny economic size. when faced with competitors of equal or larger size, investment loses much of its lethality, perhaps the most hilarious example being the glorious revolution (iirc the dutch ended up owning like 40% of english debt and still got btfo’d afterwards). while it occurred without the presence of a global reserve currency (debt was in pounds), it also occurred without one of the parties being able to leverage ~30% of global production to such a comprehensive degree. the point is that capital will naturally flow towards new ascendant and coherent cores, cores who will notably NOT all in on a maximalist push against the extant system until they are forced to do so.

last thing i would like to note is that there is much precedent for overproduction and depression being a precursor to financialization, which itself is commonly linked to a perception of hegemonic ascent (as good marxists we obviously all know financialization is the most obvious symptom of hegemonic decline). we see it in dutch shipping pre 1650, british steel pre 1870, and obviously gilded age amerikkka. transition periods are stochastic almost by definition, and it would be prudent to discount anyone quick to jump to hard conclusions.

with the sino/us geneva agreement in danger of breaking down due to chips/rare earths dispute, one wonders if china bottlenecking RE will finally allow the US to rediscover industrial policy. it’s pretty clear that chinese dominance in REs allows them to crush any competitor on the free market at will, with the disturbing implication that the XHS strategy of using fake money (but i repeat myself) to build out supply chains in peripheral countries, at least in this sector, could be less than optimal. it was dicey for strategic necessities in the first place, but for something with as much capital overhead as REs the risks become noticeably starker.

it appears that the necessity of security of production, once subsidized by western technological and financial superiority, is once again asserting itself as hegemony erodes. the ongoing russian drone fiasco provides illustration in this regard (i think someone else actually mentioned factories being a more valuable target inthread). the working assumption is that no one is dumb enough to halfass things in this situation (the actual working assumption is nothing ever happens), but i wouldn’t rule out the funniest outcomes of building processing in australia/greenland or failing to protect monopoly power from non-government corpos.

But the US can mobilize unemployed/underemployed domestic resources and put them into better use.

like i said, it’s a political problem, not a technical one. to utilize those resources is likely politically toxic as of right now, which is why we don’t see any movement thereof. like, if real life were a map painting game, the one billion americans meme is probably not such a bad idea for the US in the medium term, but it’s constrained less by how fast the US can birth/import 600 millionish burgerlings and more by the willingness of the american ruling class to create conditions that can sustain that level of spawn. how fast the culture at the top changes is anyone’s guess and it’s a race to the bottom on both sides of the pacific.

in any case, as good marxists, it is understood that political solutions are usually downstream of material changes. considering the current rate of nothings happening per week, i think it is not overly optimistic that we will begin to see the quantitative changes accumulating into some sort of transition stage toward qualitative transformation in the next 2 to 5 years. whether or not that transformation is something actually conducive to the human race, again, remains to be seen.

i’m not an accountant, so i don’t know what the specifics would look like, but i would like to point out that the main problem here is political and not technical. just as the US as it stands could technically print its way out of any economic hard spot, technically, china could also pivot to an electricity backed currency on top of thoroughly modernizing its water purification and distribution networks. these in conjunction with the tax reforms would usher in another round of growth that would be on par with the post GFC real estate boom as well as position china favorably at the beginning of a parallel and more modern economic order. unfortunately, reform of those three taxes is equivalent to a revolution for the bourgeoisie, and would count as the fourth major redistribution event (could also be considered elite replacement event if we’re feeling superstructural) in the CPC’s history after the GLF, GPCR and reform and opening up.

i personally don’t find it likely that the party has the internal political will or consensus to commit to reforms on this level, but thankfully we have comrade trump to act as an external catalyst, and so it remains to be seen how things will play out.

adults need these as well, just have to add up to date references and better illustrations than the 3d garbage that has replaced a lot of the art in these books

could just be marketed towards adults as a curated hobbyist subreddit knowledgebase, kids are mostly only there for the pictures anyway

3 main types need to be implemented: capital gains, inheritance, and customs. realistically these reforms can probably only be implemented after the current geopolitical turbulence is over as such changes would mostly affect bureaucrat-oligarch party insiders and would face much more internal resistance than even the purges of the last decade. as such, there is likely significant vested interest within the party to keep the US on life support as much as possible. not in the XHS sense that they will allow the USD to indefinitely parasitize the world (that would be naive and ignorant of the current nature of capital), but rather that they’re aiming for a steady and controlled detonation of US hegemony and a relatively seamless and painless transition of power; the CPC have mostly learned the lesson that the soviet union was in reality america’s greatest ally, and that it was the americans that lost the most from soviet dissolution.

saudis should have very publicly insisted that the us use them as a launchpad for a land invasion of yemen, would have been much more fun to watch the regime wriggle out of that than whatever this is